FURTHER ADVENTURES OF AN AMATEUR BOTANIST The happiness of the good old times is a mere dream in every age; but to keep on the laws of the old times, in preserving to reform, in reforming to preserve, is the true life of a free people.--Freeman: _The Norman Conquest_. "Vitoria," explained the guard, whom Cartaret inveigled into conversation next morning, "is the capital of the province of Alava." "Eh?" said Cartaret. "Then there's more than one Vitoria, my friend. If I'd only studied geography when I was at school, it might have saved me a week now." He tried to make talk with a hatless Englishman in tweeds, who was smoking a briar-pipe in the corridor. "Vitoria," said the Englishman, "is one of the places where Wellington beat the French under Joseph Buonaparte and Jourdan, in the Peninsular War." "Didn't the Spanish help?" asked Cartaret. "They thought they did," said the Englishman. Cartaret had had small time in Paris to learn anything about the strange people and the strange country for which he was bound; but, had he had weeks for study, he would have learned little more. Centuries had availed almost nothing to the scholars that sought to explain them. The origin of their race and language still unknown, the Basques, proud and wild, free and self-sufficient, have held to themselves their sea and mountain-fortresses from the dawn of recorded history. The successive tides of the Suavi, the Franks and the Goths have swept through those rugged valleys, and left the Basque unmixed and untainted. From the days of the Roman legions to those of the Napoleonic armies, he has withstood the onslaughts of every conqueror of Western Europe, unconquered and unchanged. The rivers of his legends draw direct from the source of all legends; the boundary of his customs is as unalterable as the foundation of his Pyrenees. The engines of imperial slaughter, the steady blows of progress, the erosion of time itself, have left him as they found him: the serene despair of the philologist, the Sphynx of ethnology, the riddle of the races of mankind.